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Introduction

The mood of the String Quartet in E minor Op 83 is wry, the sharp rhythmic gestures at odds with the hollow, irresolute harmonies. The first movement is intricate, with subtle internal cross-references. The tonality is fluid. The first two bars are in E minor but rise to a D natural, giving a modal flavour. Elgar often avoids root-position chords, and relates keys by minor thirds rather than by more conventional fifths. The second subject sounds smooth and lyrical but its rhythm turns out to be an expansion of the jerky first subject. When it is developed the viola has it between soaring violin and plunging cello. Recapitulated, it becomes sad and inarticulate, broken by rests. It is extraordinary that this highly strung music should flow so spontaneously. There is a coming to terms with life here, an experienced but undogmatic voice.

The second movement sounds artless. Piacevole, Elgar directed it—‘agreeable, pleasant’. Elgar’s wife likened it to ‘captured sunshine’: perhaps the long spells of drowsy repetitions against pedal points made her think of the ‘sound of bees and insects on a hot summer’s afternoon’. But there are also stabs of pain, and the sound, though sweet, is thin, often in only three parts, sprinkled with harmonics and finally muted. This sunshine is fitful and autumnal.

Lady Elgar wrote that the finale is ‘most fiery & sweeps along like Galloping of Squadrons’. The thrust and resolution of the opening justify that description, as does the breadth of the ending. The second subject allows some relaxation, but a phrase from it is then vigorously propelled, so bringing together the motoric power of the first subject and the lyricism of the second.

Recordings

'Eloquent and sensitive performances of some of the finest British chamber works of our century' (BBC Music Magazine)'Outstandingly beautiful playing … of beguiling sensitivity and exhilaration' (CDReview)» More

Both Elgar’s String Quartet and the Piano Quintet are works of great depth and elegance. Their conservative style disregards the compositional trends of the time and displays an unabashed late-romanticism. The disc features sumptuous playing from ...» More

Details

The Violin Sonata was finished in September 1918. The String Quartet is dated three months later, and shares the same key, E minor (this was also to be the key of the Cello Concerto). This was Elgar’s only mature string quartet—despite drafts for four, possibly five, quartets from his youth—and he knew that writing it was not a task to be undertaken lightly. Elgar’s E minor Quartet is one of his masterpieces. Valedictory yet forward-looking, it is the work of a major composer at the height of his powers.

The first movement is one of Elgar’s greatest structural and emotional achievements. The first theme, anchored in the home key, is ambivalent in its metrical pulse, being cast in 12/8 and in 4/4. The 4/4 time signature could have been used throughout, but its interruption of the basic 12/8 flow creates a striking emotional effect. In this regard, the first movements of both of Elgar’s symphonies are recalled—not so much thematically (although the E flat Symphony is closer) but in dynamic interaction. Thus, before announcing all the themes on which the first movement is based, Elgar has postulated a considerable compositional problem. But, as with everything he wrote, it is expressed in music of deep emotion, and with much subtlety, for within the first subject we encounter elements of three themes, thus making an exposition within an exposition. This would seem to call for extensive development but what we have here is music which is highly concentrated—the opposite pole from the prolixity for which his art is often criticized by those who understand it least. Such contrasted juxtaposition demands a further expansion—that of tonality, and Elgar’s free-ranging mastery is here shown to be consummate. The movement is in E minor but ranges through such disparate keys as F major, C minor and B flat minor (within an E minor context), the music compensating for its overt lack of thematic-developmental dynamism by being wide-ranging in metre and tonality, which in turn make the recapitulation and the concluding coda amongst the loftiest utterances Elgar ever wrote. Here is great art, suffused at the very end of the movement by an autumnal mood—common to much of Elgar’s late music—partly of reminiscence, of a resigned acceptance of life’s experience. In this regard one can at times sense a looking-back—the Serenade for Strings is fleetingly alluded to, more than once. The recapitulation, in reverse, makes the simple cadence of E minor to E major in the final bars something new, and deeply moving, in his music.

The complexities of the first movement demand relaxation. In the second, marked Piacevole [peacefully] (Poco moderato), we have just such a reverie. This begins without the first violin as a simple string trio for twenty-two bars—and when the first violin enters it doubles the second at the octave, continuing the trio-like texture for a further twelve bars. In the first movement’s muscular moments, double-stopping strained the medium of four stringed instruments: here, in utter contrast, we are given a theme of simplicity and beauty in a movement which also looks back to earlier times—to the Chanson de matin, which is similarly quoted. This movement was one of Lady Elgar’s favourites and was played at her funeral in 1920. For all the overt simplicity, the key of the Piacevole—effectively a slow movement but akin to a Brahmsian Intermezzo—is C major which, retrospectively, embraces the ‘foreign’ tonalities of the first movement, forming a deep bond with E minor, and glimpses the ultimate key of E major.

How this is achieved is quite remarkable and deceptively simple. We know, in terms of structural tonality, that Elgar’s Quartet is in E minor: the first movement, for all its forays, did not leave that ‘home’ key for any great length of time. It actually ended, magically and quietly, in E major. The Intermezzo-like second movement was in the simple and classically pure key of C major. In this context the note E defines C major, preventing it from falling into the minor mode, with further emotional implications. C major was the key of reminiscence, but as the end of the first movement implied E major, not E minor, as the ultimate goal, the finale embarks upon a thrilling musical journey.

The finale, Allegro molto, begins with a peremptory gesture which anchors E minor but which is so fast we may not realize that it takes as its springboard the very C–E third with which the second movement ended. There is, however, no emotional reminiscence here, no ‘looking-back’ to the keys or themes of reverie. So, if C major is to be erased from the work’s ultimate tonal goal, its dominant, G, also has to be removed. But just as the note E defined C major, so the note G defines E minor—therefore E minor cannot be the final key. It has to be E major, whose mediant is G sharp. Quite apart from the artistic skill of such a tonal framework, the music bears out the emotional implication: exceptional in Elgar’s mature compositions, the finale of his String Quartet does not recall earlier music in the work. Thus the tonal structure has defined the emotional nature of the music with breathtaking mastery. The finale is intense in rhythmic élan, mercurial in its flight through oblique keys, and propelled by themes so germinally related as to cause the compositional virtuosity of their construction to be hidden as secretly as any enigma.

The result is a great masterpiece. Deep processes are at work in Elgar’s Quartet—a new Elgar, suggesting a golden ‘final period’ which did not, sadly, flower as one might have hoped. The death of Lady Elgar, to whom he owed so much, removed the mainstay from his life, and new music—in England as well as on the Continent—was the rage in the post-war years. The torch had been passed to those of younger generations.